One of the designers who made it happen

How ISKME started their twitter background design journey

Company name

Overview

About OER Commons:

OER Commons (http://www.oercommons.org) is an open teaching and learning network launched by ISKME in March 2007 to stimulate an education ecosystem that thrives on interaction and knowledge sharing. The site has 16,400 registered users, averages 50,000 visits a month from 195 countries. OER Commons offers an infrastructure for teachers, students, curriculum experts, and others to collaborate around the use and improvement of high-quality educational resources. In 2007, ISKME was named an Education Laureate for Technology Benefiting Humanity, by the San Jose Tech Museum of Innovation, for its development of OER Commons.

OER Commons is an Initiative of the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME). ISKME is a leader in research on social learning and open education. ISKME integrates a range of collaborative practices using open-source learning content, or Open Educational Resources (OER), with a research-based pedagogy focused on participatory learning for K-20 teachers and learners.

ISKME catalyzes teachers and learners in the shift from a consumer culture for educational resources, to one in which teachers gain leadership and support to adapt and develop resources for their own needs, and then share those resources with others.

Tell us a bit about who you are and the people you reach

Teachers, Students, Lifelong Learners, Open Educational Resources (OER) Advocates...People looking for educational resources on any topic and people who are experts on OER (to answer questions). Our goal is to help the crowd of experts around OER to help OER-seekers find a free-to-use learning resource that is as good as or better than resources available for cost.

We want an OER seeker to take one glance at our Twitter profile and get the message that they can send an @Reply request for an open learning resource under the Hashtag #oerlib and receive a referral response to their request from a crowd of volunteer OER Experts.

We want an OER Expert to take one glance at our Twitter profile and get the message that they can send a reference request response with the hashtag #oerlib and it will show up in our stream.

The design mood we would like to convey is that this is an open collaborative space that inspires the crowd to serve as OER Advocates and teachers and learners to feel welcome to ask questions.

Requirements

We are developing a crowdsourced support service for finding Open Educational Resources hosted through our Twitter account @OERLibrarian.

Here's what the process will look like:
Step 1: A question comes in through an @ Reply to @OERLibrarian that is tagged with the hashtag #oerlib
Step 2: Volunteers identify OER that meets request criteria
Step 3: Volunteer posts reply to the question by using the #oerlib hashtag and it shows up in the @OERLibrarian twitter stream.

Only rule: Resource answers must be free-to-use

We would like our background to:
1. display this process in a visual diagram that syncs well with our branding for OER Commons ( a rough mockup is attached).
2. integrates our ISKME branding. We would like the background to convey that OERLibrarian is an initiative both of ISKME and of OER Commons (some branding materials are attached that can be incorporated)